Has anyone else been having trouble logging onto naherp this week? The home page and various links aren't loading for me, and I was wondering if this is a problem with my connection settings or sever, routine site maintenance on their part, or whether something else is going on. Thanks!

I and many others put an incredible amount of work into that project, literally thousands of hours of my life, partly in trust of Don's explicit promise that NAHERP would stay up as long as he was still alive.

I don't regret that time, I had a lot of fun and NAHERP already did some good, but I still really hope that Don makes good on his promise and I believe he will.

At the end of 2017, I told HERP leadership that I needed to update my server to PHP 7. The code for NAHERP is not compatible though. My work load has increased, and I don't have the time to go through and rewrite the NAHERP code. I had actually set out to do it back in 2015 or 2016, and it just kept getting put off due to other things I had to deal with. I said that someone else would have to be found to update the code, but that would also mean that the site would have to be moved, because the majority of security issues I have had to deal with on my server over the years, was from code written by other people that I hosted sites for on my server. I gave until Jan 1, 2019 to find a solution, and nothing was done until the last minute. I then delayed the update another couple of months, but could only put it off so long. The same day I did the update on my server, a new server was ordered for NAHERP, but there was an issue with the provisioning scripts, and it wasn't setup properly. It took a number of days for the server company to get it figured out, but once the server was up, I had the site copied over in a very short amount of time, and it is currently back up. The current server I believe is meant to be temporary, and some long term solutions are being looked into. I was told that one possible option was that Brian Hinds would end up hosting it at his company.

Don's explicit promise that NAHERP would stay up as long as he was still alive.

That's not what I promised. I promised that as long as I was alive and physically able to do it, that there would be a database project, but I never explicitly said HERP. I even made that clear in a post back in 2011.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for keeping NAFHA alive as long as possible, and I will do everything I can to help ensure it's longevity as long as possible. Things change though, and who knows where we will all be in 50 years, or where the internet will take us in 100 years. I think anyone who puts faith in any institution being around forever are a bit naive. There are plenty of unknown circumstances that can affect our group. I do think we will be just as stable as any other current institution, but I also know unexpected things happen. My plan is to ensure that the data we collect will outlive us and any organization we have formed or will form.

Look at that last sentence of my post I quoted above. That plan, to ensure data we collect will outlive us, is one of the reasons I decided to do HerpMapper, and the reason I changed the data release process for it. I can't ensure data will outlive us, if people are able to delete their records from NAHERP. I can't ensure the data will outlive us, if people can choose to withhold their data, so it can never be shared with anyone else. If I die, and they never released their data, then it dies too. If people abandon their account, the data dies then as well. It doesn't matter how long I kept the data, if the person who entered the data was no longer around to release their data to the person requesting it, then it's dead. We tried to address the issue over the years, and it seemed to always stall out.

It is to the point that I am simply not physically able to do the work at this point. No due to injury or illness, but because I need there to be 4 of me to get everything done that I need to do. My customers that I do the majority of my professional work for are trying to move into new types of business, which means a lot of work for me writing code for new sites, and in the case of one of the sites which is for Muslims looking to get married, dealing with security and attacks every time the site is mentioned in an ad or on TV when the owner is interviewed about it. It also turns out that when you are a philanthropic programmer with a soft spot for conservation, that a lot of people need your help. I need to use my time efficiently, and that requires making choices about where I think the biggest impact can be made. There was only three data requests in 2018, and all of them were for the state of California. I don't think dedicating time to NAHERP, has an impact any longer.

Jonathan, I had your reply pulled up, and wanted to address it, but it appears to have been editted now before I had a chance to do so. I mainly want to address this point

In the same thread you quoted was this statement:

If there is ever talk of NAFHA taking control of records (aside from maybe changing the taxon, maybe), from people who are active and participating, I would walk away from the project. That is the one place where I would be evil dictator Don, put my foot down, and then take my ball and go home.

There is no contradiction there with how the way things went down. People signed up to NAHERP, under the premise that they maintain control of their data. I do not support taking away that control from people, without their consent, because of what terms were in place when they entered data. I had pointed out to a number of people even, that the wording of the by-laws, actually said that HERP could release a person's non-sensitive data without their permission, but it was never done. It was never done because I am pretty sure that the intent of that part of the ByLaws, was to establish that people could choose to release non-sensitive data automatically, when other people voted for a project, that they did not. No matter the intent on the wording, the rules used in practice from the start, were that none of your data was released without your explicit permission, or unless you changed a setting allowing it to be released in certain instances when you either didn't vote, or you voted against a project, but everyone else approved. The solutions that were being talked about for NAHERP, were to allow people to voluntarily release their data to the control of NAFHA/HERP, or were specifically dealing with orphaned data in accounts that had not been accessed in a certain period of time (notice, I did say "from people active and participating").

HerpMapper was started with a different release process, and all data submitted to the project was done so under those terms. HerpMapper never took control of the data, the control was given as part of the terms of participation, and the rules were in place when the project started.